Hi! I'm Bob Monsour. I'm a web hobbyist that enjoys building websites with 11ty and writing about things.
Contents Introduction Specifying what I wanted The Satori plus sharp libraries What posts are eligible for a generated og image? The renderer Caching the generated PNGs The orchestrator Conclusion Introduction I've had a love-hate relationship with open graph images for a while now. There were times when I did not have any, or perhaps a fallback to my social media avatar, which looked outsized.…
Contents Introduction Highlights Analytics Deployment Tooling Finding my web dev tribe in retirement Eleventy becoming Build Awesome Conclusion Introduction I'm finding it increasingly hard to believe that I've just completed 3 full years of building, refining, and maintaining the 11ty Bundle website . But here we are... I wrote a recap of the 2nd year too. Highlights In no particular order:…
Contents Introduction Migrating to Cloudflare Workers What does deployment look like now? Conclusion Introduction I've got several sites hosted at Netlify and several at Cloudflare. The ones at Netlify do not require frequent updates and, for some of them, I can't even remember the last time I updated them...the blessing of static sites...that remain static. I had moved this site and the 11ty…
I consider myself to be very fortunate. I have had the pleasure of working with great people, being in the right places at the right time, and saying "yes" when I could. One of my recent YES-es was to submit a talk proposal this year's North Bay Python . It's the ninth year of the event. I became aware of it through Adrianna Tan , someone who I had connected with in the Eleventy community. I had…
Contents Introduction Wouldn't it be nice if... Starting on a redesign of this site Let's start with colors Other home page design tweaks Enter Superpowers A positive result I wasn't done with AI yet I was watching the State of the Union IKEA makes better cabinets A custom CMS for the 11ty bundle Conclusion Introduction There was a knock at the door earlier this year. It was a guy named Claude…
The image above is the current home page of this site. I've been working on a redesign and here's a peek at my progress. My main goal is for a more minimal look, removing the background image along with layout changes and a new background color. It's feeling "right" enough to share. I've added a dark mode too. I set up the prototype to let me choose from a variety of light mode background colors…
As the title says, I did not want to have to write this post. I wanted to be able to focus on my participation in a welcoming and inclusive community for everyone, regardless of their background or beliefs. However, recent events have made it clear that there are some people who are trying to spread hate and division. Let me say what precipitated this post. As the creator of the 11ty Bundle…
One of the beauties and challenges of maintaining the 11tyBundle.dev site is the variety of sources it aggregates. As part of the ongoing effort to enhance the user experience, I'd love to have a complete set of visible RSS links, favicons, and web page descriptions for each of the blog posts and sites featured on the site. I attempt to "find" these programmatically each time that I enter a blog…
Just like my extended series on RSS IDs back in the day, the saga of bundling my CSS and JS continues. If you haven't been following along, here are part 1 and part 2 . Note that we're beyond the discussion of minification and on to the next challenge. As Nicolas Hoizey correctly pointed out to me , my most recent approach to creating and referencing the CSS and JS bundles on the 11ty Bundle…
Contents Introduction Before: The setup I described yesterday After: The new setup Conclusion Introduction It was as long ago as yesterday when I wrote about how I had decided to not minify the CSS and JS bundles for the 11ty Bundle website . As stated in the update, the issue that was causing my long build times was not the minifying itself, but rather the way I had configured the CSS and JS…
Update: While all of what is written below is true, it was not the fact that I was minifying the CSS and JS bundles that was causing the long build times. It was the fact that the minifying was taking place for each and every page build. By eliminating the minifying so many times, the build time was reduced significantly. A better approach, if I did want to minify, would have been to create the…
If you work with 11ty and make use of the 11ty Bundle website , we're redesigning it and we'd love your input. Please take a few minutes to complete our survey and share your thoughts and suggestions. I'm looking at you, RSS readers.
My wife and I are visiting Carmel-by-the-Sea, California today, on our way down to Pasadena. We took our dog Soda for a walk on the beach. It was a beautiful day. The tide was low and 4 to 6 foot shorebreak was crashing unusually hard on the sloped shoreline. As a former surfer, I love these sounds. So I pulled out my phone and captured 2 minutes of it. There are some awesome crashing sounds in…
I've read Bryan Stevenson's book Just Mercy and watched the movie adaptation (the trailer video). Both are powerful and eye-opening, shedding light on the systemic racism and injustices prevalent in the US legal system. And here is Bryan sharing his experiences as a Black lawyer in the US: I am not at all shocked by this, but I'm very disappointed. And here is the full interview from which that…
By now, you've all been wondering about the red and blue colors on this site. Where do they come from? Why those colors? Well, you see, when I was a kid, I had a pen, a pen whose click I just loved. And I liked the way it wrote, the way it laid down its ink on the paper. About 10 years ago, I bought one of those pens again. And this year, as I was redesigning this site, I decided that I wanted to…
So, I was reading through an interesting discussion on the Eleventy Discord server the other day, and fLaMEd fury said something that struck me. It was something I didn't know you could do and it was something that removed a roadblock in my mind. In this simple phrase, he said: "...powered by a JSON file that is fetched (with eleventy-fetch) from a seperate repo..." I had been wanting to undertake…
Contents Introduction The redesign A brief digression Web components you say? Taking a step back, to pre-redesign Is this the right thing to do? CSS Nesting Utility classes Something I haven't tried yet - Cascade Layers Some other inspirations that came into play Conclusion Introduction Having recently launched a redesign of this site, one of the pieces of inspiration came from a post by Adam…
I wanted to share my thoughts on two significant challenges that have captured my attention and how I am choosing to support them: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the need for better gun control in our country (the US). While I've been a supporter to an organization to address one of these challenges for some time, the other has recently earned a place near the top of my list of concerns. I'm…
It's almost August 1st, and I have mixed feelings about it. Here's a quick rundown of what's on my mind. We brought Soda home from the breeder on August 1st and she continues to be an amazinmg part of our family. She turned 9 in June and while slowing down a little, she still has lots of energy and lots of love to give. {loading="eager" sizes="500px" style="margin: 0 auto;} August 1st is the 6th…
Update (July 21, 2025): I no longer have dedicated Notes or TIL pages. All of my writing lives in the Blog . BUT, there's both a til tag and a notes tag that you can use to find those posts. A few months back, I was high on the idea of creating different types of content for my personal site. The idea that I had at the time was that it would enable me to post more frequently as some of these new…